[@OKau] So what is this all about?

Wed Jul 15 09:42:26 UTC 2015

Hi Steven,

This is my doing, after discussions with a couple of the other OK folks
here in Melbourne.

Our goal is not to chastise data owners for their poorly formatted or
poorly accessible data, but to find data that has accessibility issues
and, assuming the data is in demand from the community, see what we can
do to help data owners make the data more accessible.

The main driver from my perspective was that it wasn't clear to me when
I started GovHack that I'd need to request data from the Spatial
Datamart, deal with the fact hat Spatial Datamart went down several
times, and then wait for the data to turn up in my inbox. I completely
understand that this was a perfectly suitable resource when the data was
being requested only by other government departments and waiting a day
or two wouldn't be an issue, and I understand that data owners don't
have infinite resources to make the data trivially accessible, but I
think it's helpful for users to be aware what pitfalls each dataset has
so they can be prepared to deal with them if and when the request that
data.

I took a couple of the criteria from http://global.census.okfn.org/ to
determine the accessiblity of various data. I also intended that we
would try to drop some of our findings in the Disqus page for each data
set, but figured a central location would be a good start. I'm
completely open to suggestions on better ways to deal with this
situation.

Does that all make sense?

On 2015-07-15 19:26, Steven De Costa wrote:
> heya folks,
> 
> I might be out of the loop, but this looks like a public name and shame
> campaign.
> 
> https://twitter.com/okfnau/status/621234138956214272
> 
> Maybe there is a more effective way for okau to influence folks to publish
> machine readable data? I'm not sure if it will help okau to support the
> great efforts being put in by various jurisdictions if we are pushing
> technical frustrations surrounding  published data publicly.
> 
> But, as I said I might be out of the loop...
> 
> Do we have a broad concern surrounding open data that is being published?
> If so, could we perhaps sort out our objectives regarding the improvements
> we'd like to see and then work directly with each jurisdiction to help them?
> 
> Cheers,
> Steven
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> *STEVEN DE COSTA *|
> *EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR*www.linkdigital.com.au

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-- 
Regards,
Matthew Cengia
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